SEnuke Indexing Test – 6 Methods Tested

Let Others Know

We have been promising to run this for quite some time, an indexing test using only SEnuke links in the proportions a typical template would create them. In the past we have used a higher proportion of forum profiles and other mass generated links, because these are easier to make in mass numbers. They are also of course harder to index, our assumption being that if a system could index such hard links it would have no problem with easier one. However now we will be testing that assumption properly, and seeing exactly how different services treat our example SEnuke campaign. We are using a new template for this:

The ‘Indexer’ projects have however been removed for all except one of the configurations below:

No indexing – the control run to see how well things index when we do nothing at all. We would expect this to be around 5-10% indexing.

Typical xindexer – running the template exactly as it is above, this is the way most people will run and limits the indexing to the Social Networks only.

Full xindexer – we put every single link through xindexer services, most people can’t do this because they don’t have a large enough subscription however we of course do!

Instant Link Indexer – again every link will go through the service, we debated with regards to using the drip feed function or not. By using drip feed we expect initial results to be lower, which might visually skew the graphs and make other services look more favourable than they are. However in real life we would use drip feed so we decided to keep it for this test too, so just keep that in mind… the end results are going to be what matters here.

Indexification – every link will be passed through this service, which is not a true indexer. We are running this by user request.

BacklinksIndexer – whilst this is priced closer to Xindexer than other services we will be running it with all the links

One Hour Indexing – every link will be passed through the service

Testing will be as follows:

Check for live links and remove dead links

Check only live links for indexed status on Google

The reported index level will be based on all links and not just those submitted to indexing, at the end of the experiment we will also run a separate index check just for the Tier 1 links and another just for the Social Network links. We have included a separate Social Network in the template with no lower tiers in it so at the end we can also compare how single tiers VS multi tiers index. The campaigns are all set to complete on August 31st 2014, and we will start index testing on September 1st 2014 running retests every 7 days.

*Final includes checking for totally dead sites and removing them from the calculations.

We will publish breakdowns of the different types of links and their index rates at the end, as well as the percentages of live links. At the end of week 1 the number of live links averages 74.72% with no service showing any real deviation from the mean.

Note that ‘Xindexer Regular’ is going to have very low numbers as we are only indexing the SN’s, the purpose of this test will only be seen at the very end.

September 1st 2014 Nothing to read in to these results at all, everything is evenly matched and the only interesting point here is Bing picked up more results across the board than Google did.

September 8th 2014 Our first proper results, a week has passed since the campaigns were completed and everything was submitted. However it must be remembered that in most cases because fo drip feeding we have not seen all the links pushed through the services yet. As such in theory as they are all dripping at roughly the same pace, the slowest being Backlinks Indexer, we would like to have seen results roughly in line with each other. That is not the case as you can see, however it is massively too early to draw even the slightest of conclusions, there are just too many variables and not enough time at the moment. It is however perhaps slighly disturbing that Xindexer has come in lower than doing nothing with regards to Google indexing, I would hope that’s going to sort itself out in the coming weeks. If not, well we have some reasons why it is possible for an indexing service to actively harm your backlinks… but let us hope this is not going to be the case! Whilst we have seen some confirmed movement in the Google results there has really been nothing for Bing so far, however at least it’s consistent.

September 15th 2014 Indexing processing is still taking place, in fact for Backlinks Indexer we are only halfway through that! As such direct comparisons are not fully valid yet, but we can see at the moment regular Xindexer use is giving result that are no better than doing nothing whilst Full Xindexer is pretty much up there with the others when it comes to Google indexing. Down in the Bing camp the results are so close that while we have marked out a leader for the week it’s certainly not conclusive and we would say that the results there so far show that the services are doing nothing at all when it comes to Bing Indexing. What is interesting is our retention rates are pretty much identical over every Nuke, the lowest link retention being 67.74% and highest 70.77%. Considering this was an automated turbo nuke using basic content and SEnuke link placement that’s surprisingly impressive.

September 22nd 2014 Backlinks Indexer has had a bit of a surge and moved in to the lead for Google indexing rates, this service is actually the one set to run the slowest of them all so its possible we will see continued growth from them. Also Xindexer runs a 4 week process so we would expect to see a final spurt from them in the coming 7 days. The other services are now all completed, however that is not to say that we will not see any increases from them. Links that stay alive may still get indexed over time. The only service to fall was One Hour Indexing, but that could be just down to timing of the tests and so we shall see next week if the links return. It has been mentioned before about the ‘index dance’ where links get indexed and then become deindexed a few days afterwards, only to be re-indexed shortly after that.

Nothing seems to have moved on the Bing front, we can see the indexing rates for the control and the services are pretty much the same… what we can’t see here is the spider rate, we would expect that the ones that went through the services have at least been spidered by Bing whilst the control may not.

Link retention remains good with 2/3 created links remaining live.

September 29th 2014: Well we are at the end of the Indexing process now, it has been a full 4 weeks so that’s pretty much ‘job done’. We might seem some movement in the next week, as the last of the processing is seen by Google, but in theory we should not be seeing any big jumps from here on in. Xindexer has caught up this week nicely, and is not pretty much equal with all the other services… well other than Backlinks Indexer which just like last time with our hard links test is moving itself slowly in to the winning spot. It is not a massive victory, and it comes at a cost of being far more expensive than Instant Link Indexer and far less integrated than Xindexer.

Still no movement on Bing, I think we can conclude that these services have no impact on Bing at all… that is quite interesting in itself, that the two major English speaking engines operate so completely differently … clearly we need to have having a proper look at Bing ranking at some point.

October 6th 2014: Let start by saying generally I am quite disappointed in the result so far. We thought it would be above 30% for the best services by now, yet most of them are trailing <20%! If you look back to our ‘hard links test‘ you will see the results were about the same as this, just a few percent lower. So what is going on here? Well what springs to mind instantly is the content we used. To keep things fair, and to keep things close to how the average user works, we went with Article Builder content. Could it be that this content has been seen SO many times now that it is by very definition hard to index? I think the only way to test that will be to get another test going, and run two more Nukes one with Article Builder content and another with something a little more unique. Perhaps we can throw in some Kontent Machine too, just to see how that works out.

As for the results, well clearly again Backlinks Indexer is winning but that is at a substantial cost and effort to get the links in. Xindexer is close behind and of course has its full integration which makes it seamless to integrate, but again at a cost. Which brings us back to good old faithful Instant Link Indxer. It is cheap, 10x cheaper in fact on the larger packages, has similar results and is easy to integrate to SEnuke.

October 13th 2014: No real movement in the past week for Google, we have had a couple of small ups and down but nothing really noteworthy. For instance OneHouseIndexing has the same number of indexed sites this week as last, but its percentage of indexed pages went up simply because a few of the unindexed ones got deleted and so are not live links anymore. If things stay like this another week we will call it a day.

What has moved though are the Bing results, and they have all gone down. Given that this includes the control we can be fairly sure its not the indexing packages that have caused this, after all they also had no positive impacts either. That said Backlinks Indexer did fall further than anybody else, though of course it had the furthest to fall. We would put this down to changes in the Bing algorithm.

We definitely need to get a comparison of article sources and see if its AB that brought about the generally low results.

If things remain stable we will do a breakdown of project types and how they indexed next week.

October 20th 2014: We said we would end this week if things did not move much, and as you can see there was minimal movement other than all the Bing indexing rates went up a little. However we have just gone through Penguin 3, in fact when the above levels were taken the algorithm was still running, so lets give it one last week just to see if that shakes things up at all. You would expect there to be minimal impact, however remember Penguin is about the external links and that is exactly what these indexing services are doing in many cases.

So mark your calendars for the 27th, as we will be breaking down the results then… that is unless Google release some other major change in the next 7 days!

October 27th 2014: A big change! Most of the services seem to have no impact from Google Penguin, however Backlinks Indexer has shot up to over 27% indexed and is now so far ahead of the others that its an obvious winner. We can only assume that whatever linking they created has been been given more authority after the last update, it’s a massive jump and shows that whatever they are doing is clearly different to the other services which are all pretty much equal at 16%-17% or so. Unfortunately we now have to run things a bit longer to see if these results stick or not.

It does just to show however that the indexing results you have no may well not be the same as the ones you get in a few months time, even without touching your projects. If a nuke you did 6 months ago suddenly sees a massive increase in the indexed tiers you are going to see a corresponding increase in authority on the links pointing at your site.

November 2014 – Indexing Conclusion

For the last round of testing we made a small change in that we also looked for the dead sites, something we could not do each week. We did this by checking for alive links on Friday 31st October and then again on Monday 3rd November.We then removed sites that were shown to be dead on both days, this was to limit the impact of sites which just happened to be offline at the time we tested them.

We do have an absolute clear winner in Backlinks Indexer whom have a massive margin over any other service, however remember this margin only grew so big with the Google Penguin update, so there is nothing to say it will not be altered in future updates. However we must live in the here and now, not speculate about the future, and right here the No1 indexer is definitely Backlinks Indexer, remember they were in the lead before the update too just not by such a margin.

The problem however is one of cost and convenience. The service costs more than any other service:

Cost per link per day on Cheapest package:

Backlinks Indexer = $0.2998

Xindexer = $0.14

Instant Link Indexer = $0.02754

1 Hour Indexing = $0.0047 (there is also a None API version at $0.017)

Indexification = $0.000359

Details of cheapest package:

Backlinks Indexer = $14.99 for 50 links a day

Xindexer = $14 for 100 links a day

Instant Link Indexer = $13.77 for 500 links a day

1 Hour Indexing = $47 for 10,000 links a day (Cheaper packages have no API)

Indexifcation = $17.97 for 50,000 links a day

So Backlinks Indexer is quite a lot to be paying for your links, we perhaps would not mind covering that cost for our Tier 1 links but it seems crazy to be spending so much on a forum profile! If you want to run with Backlinks Indexer I would suggest going with a smaller package with them and only pushing Tier 1 through them, then take a cheap package with one of the other companies and push all the others or even every link including the tier 1 again through that. That would give you the extra indexing power where it counts, while not ignoring or overpaying for your lower tier links.

Looking just at Tier 1 Social Network indexing levels in Google we see:

Control = 10.26%

Xindexer Full = 28.74%

Instant Link Indexer = 39.24%

Indexification = 16.67%

Backlinks Indexer = 46.81%

Xindexer Regular = 21.05%

1 Hour Indexing = 37.18%

Here you can see that ILI and 1 Hour Indexing are not too far behind Backlinks Indexer where it counts the most, though Indexer has fallen to a distant last place. Remember though that while Xindexer regular is bottom of the pack when it comes to services it is free with your SEnuke subscription, giving 100% more indexing that the control for no extra cost.

Out of interest the Tier 1 indexing levels for Bing were 0% … yes Zero for every service, not a single page was picked up by Bing. This goes to show that if you are interested in Bing marketing there is no point at all in using these services. The odd thing however is that getting Bing results with SEnuke is easier than getting Google ones, so whilst they are not indexing our pages we know they are looking at them. So whilst we just said there is no point using these service it is possible that the services do at least help the Bing spider to see the page and pass on some power, we just have no way to prove this.

Which Package?

Our package of choice is actually still Instant Link Indexer because despite being a distant second in the results they have a better range of packages on offer at a lower price that best suits the end user, with plans of 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 and more links per day there is something for everybody. These are the sorts of levels Nukers need, unless you are doing a total spam campaign you can’t ever need 10,000+ links a day with SEnuke (However they have packages to cover that if you are). They also integrate nicely with the Toolbox API in SEnuke, and even offer direct support and guides on setting up their service with SEnuke.